In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows.
…
The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.

Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

To Team Obama, Bergdahl and the rest of those soldiers were just kids who didn’t study hard enough and got stuck in Afghanistan.

A top aide to President Obama is now apologizing to Congress for not informing lawmakers, as required by law, that the White House was planning to trade…

(Democratic Senator Dianne) Feinstein said that it was “very disappointing” that President Obama decided not to alert Congress about the deal…Feinstein said that in previous conversations with Senators about the trade, “there were very strong views and they were virtually unanimous against trade.” “The White House is pretty unilateral about what they want to do when they want to do it,” she added…

Unilateral? Whoa, did someone say the President was being “unilateral”?!

Secretary of State John Kerry escalated his criticism of Edward Snowden, calling him a “coward” and a “traitor,” and saying that the NSA document leaker should return to the United States from Russia and “make his case.”

“Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor and he has betrayed his country,” Kerry said in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” with Chuck Todd. “And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.”

One big topic that I haven’t explored yet–even though I’ve meant to do so since the start of the series–is the way in which liberal ideas are perpetuated on social media and elsewhere through the use of simple-minded memes. As I considered the idea of social liberalism, one point which came to mind is that so many liberal memes might seem catchy at first glance, but they are either responses to outlandish straw men, or they make no sense whatsoever when subjected to even the slightest bit of scrutiny.

We’re all familiar with the common liberal tropes about “beating swords into plowshares” and the frequent lament heard on the left that “if we spent on education or social programs what we spent on the military” somehow all of society’s ills would disappear. This meme takes that same tack, but uses “irony” to take it one step further by suggesting that the government can use the military to “win the hearts and minds of the population” and put the “locals to work” working on infrastructure politics.

By supposedly employing “irony” to make its point, therefore, it moves from the simple-minded lament about spending more on education and social programs into the territory of the pernicious by endorsing the use of the military as a means of social control. The person who posts or re-posts the idea can feign ignorance of the pernicious implications by saying that the meme isn’t “serious” or that it is “just making a point through irony,” but it’s a point which betrays the left’s ignorance of the way free people and free markets operate. The point of the meme is unmistakable: all good comes through government, and we ought to use the force of government to establish a planned economy.

The Facebook page for “Being Liberal” attributes this meme to one of its readers named Terry Sebolt who wrote in and said (with the disingenuousness common on the left): “”Those were my words, but not my pic. Feel free to put it anywhere you want. I meant every word of it, and hope people enjoy the irony, regardless of credit. It was a throw away line…”

Regardless of the authorship, though, the claim is intended to make a point by shocking, even though those who quote the statement will try to distance themselves from its actual implications. Those implications, though, tell us a great amount about the worldview of the left.

What’s even more amazing in the case of the person I know who re-posted this meme is that she is an immigrant from eastern Europe with a PhD in a scientific field from an American university. She often refers to the bad days growing up in her country under a brutal dictator when everyone was suffering. And so she moves to the U.S. and spends time in universities and decides that she’s a “liberal” and approvingly re-posts that “ironic” image. If that’s not an example of a socially-promulgated disorder, then I’m not sure what would be.

Haidt argues that our concern over these victimless behaviors is rooted in our biology. Humans evolved to feel disgusted by anything that when consumed makes us sick. That sense of disgust then expanded “to become a guardian of the social order.”

This impulse is at the core of the culture war. Those who have a low sensitivity to disgust tend to be liberals or libertarians; those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservative.

The full video of the speech is available at the above link.

My reaction to all this is that it 1). depends on how one defines conservative, and 2). it depends on what kinds of things one labels or considers to be examples of disgust.

With respect to point 1)., I think that a large portion of the conservative coalition is rather heavily libertarian-leaning, and it just makes more sense for us to identify as conservative and vote for Republicans because the Libertarian party seems doomed to remain a fringe party, at least as long as that party’s leadership continues to endorse an isolationist or head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy. Now while it may be the case that many traditional “social conservatives” have a “high sensitivity to disgust” with respect to issues of sex, I’m not even convinced that that is as widely the case as Haidt’s remarks suggest. I’ve heard socially-conservative Christian ministers talk about sex in ways that show they may have a better understanding of the variety of human sexual experience than many academics who claim to be experts on the subject.

On the other hand, with respect to point 2)., I can find many, many examples of “disgust” fueling the attitudes of liberals and leftists. One could begin by looking at their intense hatred of Sarah Palin and anyone like her. Some of that hatred, I would argue, was fueled by a disgust at the lives of anyone who doesn’t live the life of a modern liberal in a major coastal city.

Most modern liberals are disgusted by hunting, by the people who shop at Wal-Mart, by the petroleum industry, by the food industry, by the military, by evangelical Christians, and by the reality of life in small-town, rural America. James Taranto and British Philosopher Roger Scruton call it “oikophobia”: it is a worldview which accepts or excuses the transgressions of select special-interest groups or of non-western cultures, while it judges the familiar by a harsh standard and condemns them with expressions of disgust at the nature of their lives.

FROM THE COMMENTS: James doesn’t “get the point of this post. We have free speech in this country, and that person is exercising his or her view to not support enlisting in the military.”

He’s right. The driver does have the freedom to express his view of the military. And I have the freedom to mock the driver for trying to discourage men and women from enlisting in order to defend this man’s freedom to criticize military service.

That said, point well taken, James, especially about liberals not being the only ones who drive hybrids. I have met a handful of conservatives who drive such vehicles–and sometimes with great enthusiasm.

Whoa. Jim Geraghty at NRO (and hopefully you’re subscribing to his newsletter like I do) offers the tidbit of the day from President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall yesterday (and Moe Lane provides the cued-up video):

We’re still gonna have to make some tough decisions about Defense spending, or even on programs that I like but we may not need.

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

Oh boo freaking hoo. Glenn and I had a minor dustup on the topic via Twitter yesterday:

Glenn Greenwald is constantly telling us that the reason the terrorists want to kill us is not because they are regressive degenerates who hate Western values like freedom and tolerance, but rather because they just don’t like our military policies and how we’re all meddling in their business.

Well, I am not a man without a heart, so I am willing to propose a solution to Greenwald’s problem which I am confident the Army would be amenable to. As an added bonus, it will serve as an opportunity to validate Glenn Greenwald’s views on the causes of Islamic terrorism. We will give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back, and remove him from solitary confinement. In fact, we’ll let him be around lots of people. We’ll call an emissary with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and tell them that we have a political prisoner to release to them, no strings attached. We will tell them that we are going to release to them an American who thoroughly rejects our interventionist policies and our military meddling – he rejects them so strongly, in fact, that he did everything in his power to see that American soldiers were killed and that Islamic terrorists were given access to our operational details. Therefore, we have decided to let him go to be with the Taliban so that he can self-actualize and join the fight against America with them.

I’m sure that like John Walker Lindh, the Taliban will be happy to have an American like this on board. So we’ll drive Manning out there to meet them at some safe remote location in Afghanistan somewhere, and we’ll release Manning and let him rush to join his new Taliban brethren.

Then we’ll tell them he’s gay.

Sign me up to help complete this diplomatic arrangement! I think Manning would prefer my solution anyway: firing squad.

As Michelle Malkin documents, this is not the first time military recruitment centers have been targeted.

And it’s not just USA Today which has devoted more attention to the murder of the abortion doctor. Over at Newsbusters, Amy Ridenour finds there are “14 times more stories about George Tiller in Google News.” It could be, she speculates (with tongue firmly planed in cheek), because Tiller’s murder occurred 24 hours earlier.

Salon, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos have already identified Bill O’Reilly as the culprit for abortionist George Tiller’s murder, so I now heap the blame on Keith Olbermann and all of the above mentioned websites and CNN for the shooting at a military recruiting center in Arkansas. . . .

We know that Markos Moulitsas, owner of the Kos, wants those fighting in Iraq and reporting in Iraq to die because he has expressed that opinion himself, and the other liberals have been encouraging the deaths of military recruiters and soldiers just by being against the war and against recruiting.

During a House Judiciary Committee meeting, Congressman Steve King (R-IA) offered up an amendment to the hate crimes bill to exclude pedophiles from being a protected category under the hate crimes legislation.

Every single Democrat voted it down.

In the same meeting, Congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) offered an amendment to include veterans as a class protected under the hate crimes bill. Not only did the Democrats vote it down, but Cogresswoman Debbie Waasserman Schultz attacked the Republicans for even thinking veterans might need protection under hate crimes legislation. After all, who but Democrats in Congress hate veterans?

And, after all, the Dept. of Homeland Security has all but declared veterans as “right wing extremists” intent on violence. So I guess Congressional Democrats are just trying to be consistent with Gestapo Janet.

U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he is sending two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, marking the start of what many believe will be an escalation that will ultimately see the U.S. forces there double.

There are some 36,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan, and the additional 17,000 alone represent a nearly 50 percent increase.

The CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as “an illegal instrument used by the United States.” Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

That’s funny, I thought the American Left told me it was one of the WORST parts of “Bush’s War.”Â In fact, wasn’t there even a leftist Hollyweird movie, that made little, called “RENDITION”.Â Â My, oh my.

Pop.Â Pop.Â Pop.

Score one positive mark for President Obama.

Exit Question: Will the anti-Bush liberals who comment at GayPatriot now support this terror-fighting tool?Â Or are they just tools?

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

How dare Senator Obama use the name of a dead Army soldier, whose name he can’t remember, as a sheer political stunt.Â And against the wishes of Sgt. Jopek’s family, nonetheless.Â Â

Senator McCain wears his bracelet in kinship and shared sacrifice with the family of Cpl. Matthew Stanley.

Senator Obama wears his bracelet in an arrogant defiance of what America stands for.Â To Obama, the bracelet is yet another prop for his campaign, like the American flag he once did not wear on his lapel.

John McCain was in the navy and then he was in the U.S. Senate. He has never cashed a check a bureaucrat didn’t write. I’m not trying to be glib, and I realize he was doing a solemn and dangerous job, killing people from the sky. But it was still government work.

Wait, except for those years as a POW. A sick but undeniable fact about John McCain: The only period in his life when he wasn’t living off the American taxpayer, he was living off the Vietnamese taxpayer.

John McCain’s father was in the navy and his father was in the navy. The last McCain who didn’t live in government housing owned a plantation in Mississippi when the state still had slaves.

Which is why John McCain always sounds so emotional when he gets to this line in his stump speech:

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) is seen in a video that has surfaced on the Web saying that Democrats â€œsort of stretched the factsâ€ in the 2006 elections about their ability to end the Iraq war.

In a video posted to YouTube on Thursday, Kanjorski reflects on the Democrats’ approach to the war in 2006 and said they pushed the rhetoric â€œas far as we can to the end of the fleet â€” didn’t say it, but we implied it â€” that if we won the congressional elections, we could stop the war.”

“Now, anybody who’s a good student of government would know it wasn’t true,” he said. â€œBut you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress â€” we sort of stretched the facts.â€
Â
The video was dated Aug. 28, 2007, by the person who posted it. The remarks are not placed in a larger context.

Republicans reacted Friday by calling for Kanjorski to apologize.

“For Paul Kanjorski to admit that Democrats campaigned in ’06 on a fraudulent agenda to end the war not only exposes his own calculated efforts to fool the voters of his district, but it also raises the question of whether this was a coordinated effort by the Democratic Party as a whole,” said a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Ken Spain.

â€œPaul Kanjorski should be ashamed of himself for using our troops in harm’s way as political pawns for his own partisan agenda.â€

Now come on, really.Â Â Is anyone REALLY surprised that the Democrats would use the lives of our soldiers as a bargaining chip with the American public in order to gain political power?Â Some would call that orchestrated effort…. well, treason.

Three hundred miles south of Baghdad, the oil-saturated city of Basra has been transformed by its own surge, now seven weeks old.

In a rare success, forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki have largely quieted the city, to the initial surprise and growing delight of many inhabitants who only a month ago shuddered under deadly clashes between Iraqi troops and Shiite militias.

Just as in Baghdad, Iraqi and Western officials emphasize that the gains here are â€œfragile,â€ like the newly planted roadside saplings that fail to conceal mounds of garbage and pools of foul-smelling water in the historic port city’s slums.

Among the many uncertainties are whether the government, criticized for incompetence at the start of the operation, can maintain the high level of troops here. But in interviews across Basra, residents overwhelmingly reported a substantial improvement in their everyday lives.

â€œThe circle of fear is broken,â€ said Shaker, owner of a floating restaurant on Basra’s famed Corniche promenade, who, although optimistic, was still afraid to give his full name, as were many of those interviewed.

You might recall the US Democrats who were quick to condemn the Iraqi troops actions in Basra when it began.

Oh, you don’t? Well, here ya go….Â All of these statements were made as the result of Maliki’s actions in Basra:

Not-My Speaker Pelosi (D-CA):Â â€œI hope we don’t hear any glorification of what happened in Basra,â€ said Pelosi, referring to a recent military offensive against Shiite militants in the city led by the Iraqi government and supported by U.S. forces.

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE):Â “Violence has come down, but the Iraqis have not come together.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI):Â “The Bush administration has put all of our eggs in Maliki’s basket,” Levin said. “And he’s shown himself to be a political leader who is excessively sectarian, who’s incompetent and who runs a corrupt administration.”

Last night at a Seder, we discussed the difficulty of accomplishing what so many on the left (as well as others of all political stripes) cry out for us to save Darfur. I share the sentiments of those who want to help the people in that troubled Sudanese province.

But, to help those people, we would have to defeat those oppressing them, the Sudanese government and the allied Janjaweed militias, the word defining those Arabic-speaking militants meaning, “a man with a gun on a horse.” In other words, they, like the Islamicist regime which supports them are armed.

Much as we would like, it doesn’t seem possible to stop these forces without some armed intervention. Would those who press the president to do something about Darfur support a military intervention similar to the one which toppled the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein? Would they complain if we left too early before helping set up a government strong enough to protect its people from militias like the janjaweed and allied terrorist organizations eager to win back their power and/or establish an Islamicist regime?

Unfortunately, we may have to go to war to help the oppressed people of Darfur. While it would be better to resolve this diplomatically, the United States, the United Nations and other nations have tried for years to negotiated a solution.

War may not be the answer here, but it could well be part of the solution.

I wonder how many of those who sport the self-righteous little bumper stickers proclaiming, “War is Not the Answer” on their car, also have one demanding that we “Save Darfur.”

Right now, as we’re trying to stabilize Iraq, we’re doing more than waging war against the terrorists seeking to undermine the elected government. The Bush Administration (and those supporting its broad policy in Iraq) never thought war in an of itself would be the “answer” to a brutal dictator who oppressed his people and defied the mandates of the United Nations. It was just the first step to ridding the world of his menace.

War was not the answer there. And it shouldn’t be the answer, but sometimes it’s an essential part of the response to tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and militant organizations like the janjaweed.

Fifty-five percent of Iraqis now say their own life is going well, up from 39 percent 12 months ago. And 62 percent say security in their local area is good, up 16 percentage points from last year.Â These results, from an ABC poll carried out across Iraq and released today, paint a picture of a damaged country that is gradually starting to pull itself together again.

Attitudes toward Americans are ambivalent. On the one hand, Iraqis are deeply uncomfortable with the occupation â€” 73 percent say they oppose the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil.Â [GP Ed. Note - Um, who wouldn't be opposed to foreign troops in your country?]

When asked whether the U.S. troop surge has contributed to the drop in violence, a little more than half say no. But in a telling reality check, when asked whether U.S. troops should leave Iraq now, only 38 percent agreed â€” the majority wants U.S. troops to stay until security is guaranteed.

I am very confused.Â Â Harry Reid tells me “the war is lost.”Â I’m sure that’s because he has been to Iraq several times since the surge and has seen this first hand?Â So he must be right, and the Iraqi people must be wrong.

*GP reads some news items*

Oops, no that’s not it.Â Reid hasn’t been to Iraq at all.Â Â But surely Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have sat down with General Petraeus when he has offered to brief them?Â

*GP reads more news items….*

Nope, Reid and Pelosi both refused to attend briefings given last year by Gen. Petraeus.Â Â Oh, and what was that?…..Â Senator Hillary Clinton said late last year thatÂ in order to believe Petraeus’ statementsÂ that the situation was improving, it would require a “willing suspension of disbelief.”Â Â

I guess we will just have toÂ trust the Iraqi people and the US military on the ground to tell us the truth, since our Congressional leadership isn’t at all serious about winning the Global War on Terror.

In reading Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts, I’ve been engrossed not only with the stories of gay veterans but the beginning of the gay rights movement in the 1960s and early 70s. Many of the issues and complaints that gay moderates and conservatives have about the far Left today originated during those times. The sometimes understandable radical attitudes that were expressed at that time for various causes still exist today, only now it is increasingly difficult to find any sympathy for them. The leaders of the gay rights movement quickly “merged its aims with the panoply of liberation movements asserting themselves in that era”. While “some of these alignments…made sense, others lacked intellectual consistency” (contrary to Shilts, abortion is not among those that “made sense”). For example, Shilts writes:

[G]ay libbers joined their leftist comrades cutting Cuban sugar in the Venceremos Brigade, despite the fact that Fidel Castro himself locked up Cuban gays in concentration camps. Gay lib leaders solemnly quoted Chairman Mao’s wisdom from their own little red books, though Mao’s Red Guards were known to castrate “sexual degenerates” public ly. [Gay Liberation Front members] handed out FREE BOBBY SEALE posters alongside Black Panthers, even though black liberation guru Malcom X had commented, “All white men are blonde, blue-eyed faggots”. Gays who had once been Uncle Toms to the Establishment were now Uncle Toms to the New Left…

We can see this lack of “intellectual consistency” in many gay activist groups today. They align their movement with every leftist cause no matter how tenuous the connection to gay rights they may be. Many such groups have contented themselves to being only one faction of one major political party, which in many cases has eroded their effectiveness and allows them to be taken for granted in elections. These groups have also alienated gay moderates and conservatives as well as a large portion of mainstream America. Probably the best example of this is the treatment of the military and those gays who choose to serve in uniform. This too began in the turmoil of the 1960s and early 70s that “wanted nothing to do with the anguish of gays in uniform” and “would have repercussions for decades to come”:(more…)